JUAN LUIS MARTINEZ/GDA via AP Image Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló speaks in San Juan trickle-downers_35.jpg I n his annual State of the Commonwealth speech this month, Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló announced a highly anticipated and in many ways conventionally conservative package of policy proposals to address the island’s ongoing economic and energy crises: privatizing the island’s battered energy grid, cutting corporate and individual taxes, and reforming the education system through charter schools and educational vouchers. Tucked away near the end of the governor’s speech and overshadowed by such front-page proposals was a call to enact work requirements for welfare recipients on the island. “It’s important that we protect and strengthen programs for the most vulnerable,” said Rosselló. ”Likewise, we must incentivize those that can work to find dignified work and insert themselves in the economy.” Puerto Rico’s unemployment rate was almost 11 percent in January...

(Andre Kang/AP Photos) Senator Bernie Sanders visits San Juan, accompanied by Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz, on October 27, 2017.(GDA via AP Images) D espite being granted U.S. citizenship by President Woodrow Wilson more than a century ago, Puerto Ricans continue to be treated as second-class Americans—especially in the wake of Hurricane Maria. With Puerto Rico’s economy in tatters and hundreds of thousands of residents still without power, business leaders, progressive leaders, academics, and members of Congress gathered at a Capitol Hill conference to assess the disaster and propose solutions to revive the commonwealth. Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, warned against recent attempts to privatize large parts of the island’s educational system and denounced the federal government’s shambolic response to the worst natural disaster to ever hit Puerto Rico. “...

spatuletai/Shutterstock The entrance to Disney World in Orlando, Florida trickle-downers_35.jpg F or a scenic view of America’s corporate-captured economy, just take a vacation to Disney World, where it appears that someone forgot to tell employees that they work at the Happiest Place On Earth. More than 35,000 Disney employees in Orlando had little to smile about on Monday as ongoing union contract negotiations with the entertainment giant took a turn for the worse. The Services Trade Council, a coalition of unions representing the Disney World Resorts workers, has accused Walt Disney Co. of throwing cold water on employee demands for higher wages, by turning a promised $1,000 one-time bonus into a bargaining chip. On Tuesday, nearly 2,500 miles away at the other “Happiest Place on Earth,” a union representing more than 2,700 Disneyland Resort employees in California filed their own federal charge to the National Labor Relations Board. The entertainment giant’s January announcement...

AP Photo/Patrick Semansky Myrtice Harris packages products for shipment at an Amazon fulfillment center in Baltimore. trickle-downers_35.jpg T he battle between cities to host Amazon’s second headquarters continues to dominate headlines, but the new HQ remains only the latest and largest prize in the tech giant’s long history of masterfully soliciting public subsidies. In Amazon’s quest to control same-day delivery, its network of almost 100 fulfillment centers—where products are sorted, packaged, and shipped—has now spread across 25 states. Lured by the prospect of hundreds or even thousands of new full-time warehouse jobs with competitive pay and benefits, local government officials crawl over each other to land the world’s largest online retailer in their backyard. But according to a new report by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), many of these policymakers might really be selling their constituents short. The report found that, on average, counties that are home to Amazon...

AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaks during a news conference at the Justice Department T his could be Jeff Sessions’s year. Not that he wasn’t busy in 2017, a year marked by his rescinding Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), attacking sanctuary cities, reinstating debtors’ prisons, and cracking down on recreational marijuana. Indeed, over these last few months Sessions appears to have been working with the single-minded focus of a man who reportedly came within inches of losing his job in July after falling into President Trump’s bad graces for recusing himself from the Mueller probe. But 2018 will provide him his best chance yet at Trumpian redemption. Sessions has long railed against the United States’ “broken” asylum system and the massive backlog of immigration court cases, which has forced immigrants to suffer unprecedented wait times and has put a significant strain on court resources. But the attorney general’s appetite for reform has now...